Older people - best practice gallery

The Best Practice Gallery is intended to showcase good practice in the care of older people. It is being published as vignettes and case studies within this resource. The practice examples are linked to the RCN Principles of Nursing Practice. The Principles describe what everyone can expect from nursing practice, whether colleagues, patients, their families or carers - See Principles of Nursing Practice.

The Best Practice Gallery is for members to explore the Principles further. It can include text, images and video. We hope this helps demonstrate how these examples highlight particular aspects of the eight Principles.

Your contributions of examples of good practice are welcome. They should be examples that you have been engaged in, in some capacity. These can range from individual, ward or department based initiatives up to new services and organisation-wide strategies.

In hospital practice, this could be an intervention you have introduced to improve fundamental care such as mealtimes, patient dignity, admission/discharge processes, falls prevention, person-centred or relationship-centred care, supporting people with dementia or delirium, or improving the care of older people in the emergency department.

In care home practice, perhaps you’ve been involved in promoting better end of life care, safer medicines management, or enhancing the environment of care. As a community practitioner, you may have examples of hospital admission avoidance strategies, informing commissioning, developing better processes for safeguarding older people.

If it’s making a difference to the care of older people, please share it! We’d like to invite nurses to contact us if they have further examples to share. Please email Nicky Hayes (nicky.hayes@rcn.org.uk) Older People's adviser.

You can see the examples that have been shared so far at Best practice examples.

You can also view some of the presentations describing different initiatives which were delivered at the conference on older people's nursing held in March 2012 at conference presentations.  

For further examples of good practice in care for people with dementia in general hospitals, please visit the Dementia Action Alliance website: The Right Care: creating dementia friendly hospitals.